Author: Fabrizio

Developing

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Before you start implementing career development plans for your employees, or ask one of your team members to embark in a personal development plans, you have to sit with yourself (and your managers, and the board), and be honest about a very simple fact.

Are you ready to commit to helping your people to potentially change role, job and company?

This is a major scare for most leaders. They struggle to accept the fact that somebody might one day move onto biggest thing, a more interesting role, or even a more successful organisation.

But even if you are among those who fear people leaving, there are very good reasons why you should go ahead and be serious about helping them develop their careers.

First of all, whether you are or not involved, they are going to take care of it, and it might turn out to be a whole lot worst if your company is just a passive spectator. In a particularly unclear time for my development, I had asked my bosses to help me navigate the next steps. They were not responsive, hiding behind a “you can be whatever you want to be”, and eventually I took the lead. First by making a decision that should have been made more carefully, and then by leaving the company.

Then, the idea that people will stay in the job for more than a bunch of years is nowadays highly unrealistic. In the US, the median number of years a worker stays with a company is 4.3, and the pace at which people change job in certain sectors and companies (even the most successful ones) is quite amazing. How to motivate them to stay just a bit longer than your competitors’? Well, certainly not by feeding them shallow performance reviews and promises of promotions into jobs they’ll later find out they do not care about.

Finally, you might easily end up realising that by actually developing your people, you will give them a reason to stay with you longer. There are not so many companies out there that do that seriously, and yours could be a quite big competitive advantage in the search for talents, for a pretty long time.

Multimessing

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You can do different things at the same time, yet chances are none of them will turn out to be done particularly well.

Sure you can do the dishes while talking to the kids, or prepare food while talking on the phone, or drive while listening to a podcast. You’ll be a lot more tired in the end, but for basic and repetive actions, stuff our body does basically automatically, it is possible to add something else on top.

Try though doing the dishes while your son is talking to you about a deep matter that bothers him; or impress your family with a totally new recipe while your mother is guiding you through the schedule for her next visit; or navigate the streets of a neighborhood you have never been to before while the music is on.

In those cases you’ll have to tune something down, possibly stop doing it completely. It’s exactly when you are doing important work that multitasking becomes a myth.

If you are working on a report to present during the next board meeting, and you also answer a bunch of e-mails you’ve received in the meantime, send a text to your wife to say you’ll be late, and get back to your colleague on Slack, most likely some of that greatly suffered in quality (I bet it was the report).

Work as if you are not the 2%, and allocate enough time for things that deserve your full attention. Do not get distracted, be brutal when needed, and you’ll finish faster and have time for the rest.

You lead the way

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If you set goals early on in life, you are more likely to be successful. A famous study at Yale University showed that out of the class of 1953, the 3% of students that had their ideas clear at graduation collected 97% of the wealth of the whole class two decades later. Actually, they did not.

Bias is almost impossible to avoid, but there are ways around it. For examples, few decades ago, orchestras started doing “blind auditions”. That is to say musicians who are under scrutiny are asked to perform behind a screen, so that examiners would not be influenced by their gender. The chance for women to pass the first stages of the audition has increased by 50% thanks to this simple trick to keep bias in check. In fact, it did not.

To become an expert at anything, you need to practice for 10,000 hours. Not really, to be fully honest.

What do we do when something we strongly believe in, something that is motivating us, that is driving our work, a practice that is making us feel better, a recommendation that has given us the strength to leap, is proven wrong?

We keep on going, doing our work day after day, because in the end there is only one way that is going to help you achieve what you want to achieve. Yours.

Amateurs and professionals

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“Amateur” is from latin “amator”, that means “lover”, “the one who loves”.

“Professional”, which has the same root of “profession”, is from latin “profiteri”, that means “declare publicly”, and it has for a long time denoted the vow made on entering a religious order.

The difference between amateur and professional is in their roots.

An amateur is somebody who loves something and likes to practice it.

A professional, on the other hand, is somebody who is deeply passionate about something, so much so they devote their life to it.

You can do things as an amateur (many things, possibly) or as a professional (few things, probably). The difference is in the amount of effort and work you put into it.

Near-enemies

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I love the concept of near-enemies.

In Buddhism, near-enemies are manifestations that are quite close to a desired state, yet are actually a whole lot different. So different, they are actually dangerous.

A desired state of Buddhists, for example, is equanimity. That is to say, a way of being calm and focused no matter what happens around you. It is “stability in the face of the fluctuations of worldly fortune“.

Equanimity has a clear enemy, a “far-enemy”. That is restlesness, anxiety, the desire to have things the way we want them to be. The near-enemy, though, is indifference.

From the outside, equanimity and indifference look perhaps the same. Yet they are substantially different: equanimity is not desiring things to be one way or the other; indifference is not caring whether things are one way or the other. With equanimity, we feel everything: the good, the bad, the ugly, the despair, the difficulties, the joy, the sorrow. We are simply not stuck there. With indifference, we feel nothing.

This makes me think of how much we are nowadays focused on near-enemies.

Activity, for example, that is an active force, a state in which things happen and are being done, is often mistaken for its near-enemy busyness, that rarely leads to any progress.

In the same way, our popularity (definitely not a Buddhist concept), that is the condition in which we are liked, admired, supported by others, is often mistaken for its modern near-enemies likes, fans, followers, visits, clicks or any other vanity metric of your choice.

If we expand the concept a little, we can also see how easily we are distracted by near-enemies in our pursue of something we deem important. We do not want our community to be racist or bigot or closed, we want to pursue an ideal of openness. And to do that, we aim at a target, we attack, we label and brand, we separate. Ending up in a community that is even more close than it was before.

Near-enemies are an incredibly powerful concept. If we manage to go behind their seduction, if we do not fall for their attractiveness and easiness of reach, if we force ourselves to open to the real objective of our journey. That is when the highest states that we want to achieve – for us, our families, companies, communities – become not only attainable, but also natural.